Thursday and Friday Recap

We spent a lot of time during our first three days of school learning and practicing routines and procedures. We also spent time reading lots of different stories that taught us so many things about being caring, respectful students and people 🙂 On Thursday we read “Have You Filled a Bucket Today?” and learned that everyone has an invisible bucket that can either be filled or emptied based on what they say or do. We worked together to make a chart showing things that bucket fillers say and do. Then each student thought about what they can do and wrote a sentence about how to be a bucket filler. Check out our work below:

On Friday we read two more of my favorite “beginning of the year” books: “Wemberly Worried” and “Chrysanthemum”. Wemberly taught us that everyone worries about things in their life, but finding good friends helps us to feel safe, especially at school.

Chrysanthemum is one of my favorite books because it shows students how hurtful words can be. It teaches empathy and respect – two things that are expected and encouraged in our classroom. While I read Chrysanthemum, we passed around a heart and wrinkled it each time something mean was said about Chrysanthemum’s name. At the end of the book we tried to get the heart back to how to looked before…but we could never quite get it looking perfect. The message in the middle sums up our activity perfectly: “Before you speak, Think and be smart. It’s hard to fix a wrinkled heart.” We all signed our names as a promise to always think before we speak and use kind words!

Lastly, I gave each child the opportunity to share their homework assignment about their special name. Some children chose to read theirs to the class, while others asked me to read them. It was so amazing to hear how everyone’s name was chosen and why each name, just like Chrysanthemum’s name, is perfect!